


opnieuw (again, anew)

by Pseudologia



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Amsterdam, M/M, MAWWAIGE IS WOT HAS BWOT US TOGETHA TODAY, Post-Canon, they’re older and horribly in love and the world is no longer such a terrible place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 01:20:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23126899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pseudologia/pseuds/Pseudologia
Summary: I thought of walking along the canals in December, and how different this time had been than the last—the lights lining the bridge arches gleaming prettily on the night-black water, a warm scarf wrapped around my neck as Boris and I walked shoulder-to-shoulder. It seemed life was all around me, in the cheery jingles of bicycle bells and clanging church bells, the warm orange glow of houseboat lights.they’re back in Amsterdam and theo is in love and boris, somehow, isn’t going anywhere.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 9
Kudos: 110





	opnieuw (again, anew)

We laid on the hotel bed—modern wood frame, goose-down duvet, light gray fabrics that looked and felt worn-soft; consummate hygge—and curled lazily toward each other, my fingers finding their usual spot among Boris’s curls, his right hand tucked under my ivory sweater. He was always scrabbling for more warmth, as if—like he did with food or attention or, once upon a time, booze—stocking up for some inevitable drought. Even now, some two decades since we’d first shared a bed, I still woke each morning with half his body draped over mine, like a weighted blanket that smelled of Old Spice and Djarum Blacks.

After the train ride we’d barely had enough energy to stroll around the canals and into a Syrian place for dinner (shared mazza, endless proliferations of chickpea and eggplant, free pita and baklawa squares from the too-friendly waiters) before succumbing to another wave of jet lag.

“This bed very good bed,” Boris murmured, eyes half-mast. “Why we cannot have bed like this?”

“Because this bed is from Ikea.”

“What if, in two hundred years, Ikea furniture is grand antique, ultimate symbol of—” he waved a hand, conjuring up the words “—new millennium modernism, apartment chic. Well-respected, worth millions.”

I yawned, scrunched my fingers against his scalp. He inched closer to me like some giant cat.

“Sure, we can get an Ikea bed in two hundred years,” I told him, and he snorted indignantly, tucking his head under my neck.

We lay there, Boris’s breaths growing longer and my eyes drifting closed, and I thought of walking along the canals in December, and how different this time had been than the last—the lights lining the bridge arches gleaming prettily on the night-black water, a warm scarf wrapped around my neck as Boris and I walked shoulder-to-shoulder. It seemed life was all around me, in the cheery jingles of bicycle bells and clanging church bells, the warm orange glow of houseboat lights.

“Boris,” I whispered over the clink-hiss of the taupe hotel room radiator. His hair brushed my lips as I talked.

“Mm.”

“What if I wanted to live on a houseboat in the canals of Amsterdam?”

I would do this, sometimes. The what if game. Usually, my therapist had taken to pointing out, when I was feeling especially happy—that happiness, in all its burbling unfamiliarity, scared the shit out of me, and I was constantly trying to hypothesize it out of existence. Some of the questions felt, if not useful, at least pertinent: What if I started using again? What if they found out about the painting? What if I wanted a kid? What if you wanted a kid? Others, not so much—ergo, houseboat.

But Boris just squeezed his hand lightly against my middle. “You can do anything you want, Theo.”

“And you?”

“You know me. Can live anywhere. Suburbs, Manhattan shoebox, nowhere mountain town. Timbuktu, Minsk, one time actual cardboard box. Boat does not matter.”

“You don’t think we’d kill each other living somewhere so small?”

He shrugged, voice still muddled by fatigue. I imagined his eyes were closed. “If we kill each other, we kill each other,” he said matter-of-factly. “Worse ways to die than this.”

This would happen fairly often: Boris would say something like this, something that would stop up my throat and settle high in my chest, and he would say it like he was reciting the weather. I would be in line to buy a croissant when my phone buzzed with a text from him, or running around the apartment to help him find his keys, and I would have to stop in my tracks like a dog walking into a sliding glass door, afraid that if I moved another inch before the feeling abated I would sink into a puddle on the floor.

Yet for all my bewilderment, these proclamations seemed as natural to him as breathing, or placing a hand on the back of my neck, or asking me if I’d eaten yet. Nobody else had ever loved me so fiercely, nor done it so easily, since my mother.

I did what I often did in moments like this, speechless and overcome, and tilted his head up, stroked his high cheekbones with my thumbs, before leaning down to kiss him. He opened his mouth against mine, curling his hand around my torso to reach the small of my back and pull me closer, and he sighed—a contented noise, like it should be a privilege to be kissed by me, like even though we’d done it a million times by now he was still feeling something new, just as I was, dizzy and afraid and alive and searingly, impossibly happy.

The water hissed softly in the radiator. The downy sheets crinkled underneath my ear. And Boris kissed me, our legs intertwined and his warm palm holding me close—endless kissing, a sort of early-in-love indulgence I hadn’t experienced in nearly a decade—until a placid, dreamless sleep claimed us both.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr @[donnatarttsbitch](%E2%80%9Cdonnatarttsbitch.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D) and talk to me about theo and boris going to old gay bars in amsterdam with rainbow flags in the windows and persian rugs on the tables because i am doomed to love these characters until the day i fucking die apparently


End file.
